I’m still playing this track since it first came in the late Fall of 1984. It’s that good! Amazing synth-pads and processed power-drums. Lots of dubby layers and one of the first to come up with the stutter-scrub-start/stop-pitch’downs-pitch’ups type of edits in the mix. Very hard to do and accomplish at that time. Only skilled engineers and remixers could’ve achieved those effects in the mix-downs and mastering stages. The later parts of Out Of Touch (Dub) goes through amazing phasing, flanging and delays that may have possibly been done with high-end signal/effect processors like the Eventide H3000 or the Lexicon PCM42.Very tight track that drives from start to finish.

Mid Summer 2009, a very close and longtime friend of mine RC Lair came to my side of town and hung out with me. Before going inside the Ocean Club for drinks, we stayed inside my car to listen to the entire Hale Bopp mix CD which he’d done in the mid 90′s. All the tracks on that CD were retro classics of electric disco/dance/italo ranging from the late 70′s through the mid 80′s. By the time we reachedtrack-05,I was going through the car’s roof from excitement. The track was just THAT awesome … pure electronic analog circuitry … melodic and true to its form and genre its era. And I JUST HAD TO HAVE IT … and own it! So I asked RC who/what that track was, but he couldn’t remember from the top of his head, and he wasn’t going to look through his entire record collection at any time soon, because they were all stored in boxes. Now I was on a serious mission to hunt for a full-length copy of track-05. After six weeks of unsuccessful digging and searching, I still had no name of the artist nor title of the track.

A few days later, my producer friend Peter Hecher exposed me to Casco who was an Italian legend DJ and Italo music producer. I checked out his MySpace page, his main site and all other webpages related to him; listened to all his amazing original/classic Italo tracks; and downloaded few of his old live mix-sets. When listening to one of his Italo mix-sets … low and behold … track-05! Thus immediately I sent Casco an email requesting him to identify track-05 for me. Few hours later he sent me a reply, “Mito – Droid“.

After searching the net for days, I was able to find only bad quality MP3 copies. But just recently, over the net, there was a nice fellow from Europe who had an actual 12-inch record of Mito/Droid and, at my request, was kind enough to record and send me a good quality .wav digital file of it.

However, during the entire period of searching for Mito/Droid, I had discovered that it is in fact a remix of an original 1978 “Droid” track by Automat. According to SongBooks blog:

Automat was a project of a disc, from the Italians Musumarra, Gizzi and Maggi. The first two were members of the pop band La Bottega dell’Arte that was successful in Italy between 1976 and 1984. The “Automat” LP was released in 1978 as a kind of demo Synthesizer MCS70 (Memory Controller Synthesizer 70) built by Maggi. The funny highlight of the LP is the band Droid, who say they were the opening theme of a TV news at TV Globo (Brazil) in the early 80′s. In fact parts of this theme were used twice in television news, in one of them no Globo Esporte noon. This all in it for 81/82. But it was common to the Globo television, since I remember that was used in the novel called “Brilhante”, type in 80/81. There are many more electronic themes that the Globo TV used in the field of the Fantástico.

I was able to find and download the entire Automat album on torrents. There were only four tracks in total, and all of them were in mono. At first I’d thought it was an accident by the person who recorded the album to digital, but in fact the original source of recording was done in mono. So I took the liberty to re-master Automat’s Droid, making it pseudo-stereo, adding true stereo ambient reverbs with independent left/right parameter settings, and enhancing the track’s overall low, mid and high range across its spectrum frequency (by using Waves Linear Phase Multiband plugin, among other RTAS plugins, in Protools). I’ve included both the original/mono and my enhanced re-mastered versions for comparison.

All in all, I find that Droid sounds very similar to Vangelis‘ Pulstar (1976). To my ears, it seems that Droid borrowed heavily from the melody of Pulstar with noticeable variations, although both manage to stand out away from each other at the same time.

As a bonus, I managed to find a great Italo remix of Pulstar by Hipnosis (thank you Beat Electric).

Posts To Remember

While the norm for most tracks go anywhere between 3:30 to 6:00 minutes in length, I prefer 15:00 minutes or longer, like the four seasons. Give me 4 long tracks to fill the hour, and I’ll be one very happy Iraqi. I love tracks that take me on long journeys through various movements. One of my all-time favorite synth-pop groups is PROPAGANDA from germany … who sound like twisted ABBA + Industrial + TechnoPop + Darkness. My favorite Proganda track is P:Machinery. I’ve taken two 12-inch vinyl versions of that track and conjoined them together as one … the way I want to listen to P:Machinery by:

Digitizing them into Protools; Spending two long months cleaning them up; Getting rid of every single scratch/pop/click; Restoring deteriorated sounds through various RE-SYNTHESIS processes and techniques; Splicing the tracks to separate clips; Re-arranging and layering clips to my taste; Throwing in my own synth-stabs, chops and other minor subtleties; Adding & automating series of chained top-notch effects throughout the mix, utilizing parameters some of you could not even pronounce ... thus resulting with more dynamic and reverberated DEPTH to the mix; Fattening the bottom-end; Widening overall stereo perception; and Mixing, engineering and mastering my version of P:Machinery the way I think it's supposed to be heard.

To my taste, P:Machinery sounds better than 'sick' ... more like master piece of shit which blasts sonically across the stereo-field ... not one element standing still but constantly moving all over the place.

Although he produced only a handful of tracks of renown and disappeared into obscurity almost as quickly as he had emerged from it, Manny ( Man ) Parrish is nonetheless one of the most important and influential figures in American electronic dance music. Helping to lay the foundation of electro, hip-hop, freestyle, and techno, as well as the dozens of subgenres to splinter off from those, Parrish introduced the aesthetic of European electronic pop to the American club scene by combining the plugged-in disco-funk of Giorgio Moroder and the man-machine music of Kraftwerk with the beefed-up rhythms and cut’n'mix approach of nascent hip-hop. As a result, tracks like “Hip-Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop)” and “Boogie Down Bronx” were period-defining works that provided the basic genetic material for everyone from Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys to Autechre and Andrea Parker — and they remain undisputed classics of early hip-hop and electro to this day.

What made Trevor Horn’s productions stand out was his unique and genius production techniques and the heavy use of state-of-the-art pro-audio gear, which made him become the torch-bearer for the kind of technology-led pop music which was hip and incredibly disciplined. Trevor Horn’s 12-inch remixes were uniquely long (anywhere from 8 to 13 minutes in duration) and told stories which took the listeners through long instrumental journeys at the begenning of tracks until the climax is reached (around the 5/6 or 7 minute mark). After the climax, the original or alternate full vocal version of the track takes over from that point on to the end, lasting additional 3.5 to 5 minutes in length.

Trevor Horn is the guy who produced and performed “Video Killed The Radio Star” world-wide smash-hit track. I did some major digging and discovered some fascinating, forgotten facts and hidden gem tracks from The Buggles. In 1980, the Buggles’ duo Geoffrey Downes (keyboards) and Trevor Horn (vocals) — who were coming off an international success with their new-wave album The Age of Plastic – to help out on a new YES album. Downes suddenly left Buggles when Trevor learned that YES’ keyboardist Rick Wakeman was leaving the band, and therefore snatched him as well as lead-vocalist Jon Anderson to work on the next Buggles album Adventures In Modern Recording. The Buggle’s second album was completed in 1981 but was never released or charted. The album was a gem masterpiece.

It’s been another year of great music, and we are proud to bring you Zeitgeist 2018! We analyzed the posts in our index to figure out which artists made an impression this year. The feature is split into two segments: the 25 Most Posted artists of 2018, and Breakthroughs—the artists making their Zeitgeist debut. We […]

Hard to believe, but it’s been a whole year since we launched our funding campaign. Thanks to our supporters, the three of us have been able to keep Hype Machine running, and built a few new things! If you don’t currently subscribe, join us. We wanted to share a few stats, what we’ve been up […]

It’s Zeitgeist time! We’re back with our annual collection of the year’s best music. Alongside the most-posted artists and videos of the year are two new features: First is a reflection from some of the people who defined the year in emerging music. We asked artists featured in our Stack newsletter for their favorite music […]

Three months into our funding campaign, we have been encouraged by the outpouring of support. A lot of work is still ahead: while we’re now over 3,000 supporters strong, your contributions remain key for us to invest in new features and improvements to our mobile apps. We noticed that some of our supporters occasionally had questions […]

Hype Machine turned 12 last week! That’s a long time for any service, especially an independent one. How long have you been listening with us? To celebrate, we’ve redesigned the site for better navigation and playback, and added a few new features. We’ve also introduced a way to fund our work directly. With your support, […]

It’s here! Our 10th annual roundup of the year’s best music, with the most-discussed artists and videos of 2016, and every longread we’ve Stacked each week. To start, we’ve compiled a few of the stories we’ve followed in Stack throughout the year, with artists, labels, and genres that have gained prominence in 2016. You can […]

For the first time since it’s release in 2011, Hype Machine for iOS is available for free in the App Store! Here’s what’s new in this release: We’ve added an easier way to read blog posts when playing a track: just swipe up on the artwork to see the list. There are a few other changes: we’ve removed […]

Users of Hype Machine’s Android and iOS apps will notice that display ads have started running in their apps. We are grateful to everybody who’s purchased the apps since we began releasing them in 2011. These sales allowed us to maintain them and develop new features, and we thank you for your support. We know […]

We started working on Spotify integration earlier this year, and many of you have already linked your accounts. Now you can sync your favorites and play your Hype Machine finds in Spotify! Connect here and enable Favorites Sync to begin importing your favorites to a private Spotify playlist. New favorites will be synced automatically. Also […]

This past Friday, December 2, 2016, we enabled ads in our Android app. We released Hype Machine for Android in October 2014 as a $3.99 premium app. The revenue from these sales allowed us to publish many updates, including a full rewrite, maintaining the app as the Android platform underwent rapid changes. Unfortunately, we were not able to […]

We've covered a lot of post-disco electro funk material here at Beat Electric, here's a little throwback with a more traditional straight ahead disco sound. This beautiful Canadian cut was included in a Trocadero Transfer mix we posted a while back. A friend of mine gave me this 12" around December and its haunting infectious sound has found […]

Happy New Year Beat Electricians! This is one of those highly unknown, un-googleable tracks that blows minds on the dance floor. I really did try locating some info on this boogie beast but it is mysterious! All I can say is that it was made in 1986 somewhere in the U.K. Anyway, I really like the lyrics to this track plus I have listened to the song a millio […]

Nothing to cure the Funkmosphere hangover blues like a new post. Firstly, just want to give one more shout out to Dam Funk and all of the Funkmosphere residents (Billy Goods,Laroj,Matt Respect, Ron aka Randy Watson, and Eddy Funkster) for keeping the funk strong in Los Angeles. I really says something to the quality of the night when they can stay strong for […]

This "torrential" downpour in Southern California has provided a great setting for trying to dig up some deets on Nathan McKinney and Desert Bone Records. Apparently, the info for this artist is pretty scarce, most of my search results are Youtube videos with "hynas" on cars and comments full of homies proclaiming how this is a "fir […]

Schitz always had some personal issues with his family. He grew in a loving home, but he was never happy with who he really is. To get the best personal gains with Bathmate and Hydromax, daily practice is very important. Get the most recent Bathmate updates on this new website. If you are not sure […]

Which mobster flicks have stood the examination of time? Opportunities are that you have actually most likely seen them or listened to lines from those flicks. Keep reading to discover which motion pictures make my listing of the supreme mobster motion pictures. The Godfather collection: Mario Puzo and also Francis Ford Coppella signed up with […]

Moms and dads ought to be recommended that a multitude of these inflatable bounce homes are still in the market as well as are being had fun with daily by kids of un-suspicious moms and dads. Information regarding risky degrees of lead in plastic bounce homes is really made complex to locate when one considers […]

Schitz Popinov’s express evaluation of the European ballet scene is mounted by her very early years invested in the Royal Dancing firms as well as colleges, the 1970s with the very early 1990s-a duration noted by respected imagination and also solid carrying out personalities-as well as by her developmental as well as lengthy functioning organization […]

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Mp3's on this site are for sampling and promotional purposes only and will only. Most of the mp3 tracks on this blog/site are remixes, extended and limited versions which are deleted, no longer available for purchase and would not be heard otherwise. However, please support these artists. If you are one of these artists and would like your music removed from this site, please notify me, and I will endeavor to remove them as soon as possible.